


journeys end in lovers meeting

by almostafantasia



Series: Clexa Week 2018 [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Accidental Sexting, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Clarke's bi but not much better, Clexa Week 2018, Clexaweek2018, Day 3, F/F, Lexa is a Gay Disaster, at work, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 22:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13820520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almostafantasia/pseuds/almostafantasia
Summary: Lexa’s literature project takes an unexpected turn when her partner Clarke accidentally sends her a racy selfie instead of a photo of their task sheet. Lexa has to try and find a way to finish the project without spontaneously combusting, but when Clarke realises her mistake, all schoolwork gets forgotten entirely.





	journeys end in lovers meeting

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'.

“So we’ve got a slide on each of the main themes,” says Lexa, using the touchpad on her laptop to scroll through the powerpoint presentation that she and Clarke have spent the last hour working on in the school library, “and we’ve done an in depth analysis of three main characters – do you think we need to do a fourth?”

“Relax,  _ nerd _ ,” Clarke teases. “We were only supposed to do two in the first place. It’ll be fine.”

“Which I’d know if you sent me the sheet with the presentation brief on it like you promised you’d do,” Lexa reminds Clarke.

Clarke shuffles the papers spread across their desk around until she locates the piece of paper in question, snapping a quick photograph of it using her phone.

“So shall we leave it there for today?” she asks Lexa.

“Yeah, I think we did some good work,” agrees Lexa, making sure that she saves the powerpoint, before closing the lid of the laptop and starting to collect her things together. “And we know what else we need to do. You’re going to compare the play with Shakespeare’s other comedies, while I’ll take a look at some of the different adaptations of  _ Twelfth Night _ …”

“You just want an excuse to complain about the lack of lesbians in  _ She’s The Man _ ,” grins Clarke.

“It’s one of the greatest missed opportunities of the twenty-first century!” whines Lexa.

“ _ Shhh! _ ”

Lexa holds up a hand in apology as the scowling school librarian hushes them. Swinging her heavy school bag over her shoulder, Lexa follows Clarke out of the library.

“How about we continue working on this tomorrow?” asks Clarke, once they are out of earshot of the librarian that prowls the library like a predatory hyena. “You could come over to mine after school.”

Lexa’s breath catches in her throat, before she answers, “Yeah, that sounds good.” Calming her erratic heart with a few deep breaths, Lexa adds, “Don’t forget to send me that photo!”

“Doing it right now!” answers Clarke, waving her phone at Lexa. “See you tomorrow!”

Lexa waves goodbye, her eyes lingering on the back of Clarke’s head for a second too long, and she only gets pulled back to reality by the chime of her cell phone as it alerts her to an incoming message.

Clarke Griffin

_ Here’s what you asked for ;) _

Lexa taps on the photo attachment and nearly chokes on her own tongue. Because she definitely  _ didn’t _ ask Clarke to send her a selfie of the mouth down, in which Clarke is wearing only a lacy pair of black panties and with her arm draped strategically over her breasts.

Lexa deletes it immediately. Well,  _ almost  _ immediately. Lexa stares at the photo for a good ten seconds, mouth hanging open in shock, until she realises that she’s gawking at a semi-naked photograph of one of her closest friends, clearly taken for the viewing pleasure of somebody who isn’t Lexa.

And  _ then _ Lexa deletes the photo.

* * *

 

Lexa can delete the photo from her phone, but she can’t delete it from her mind.

It’s a  _ long _ night. Lexa tries to work on her part of the presentation, but it’s really hard when working on this project makes her think of Clarke, and thinking of Clarke only reminds her of the image burning a hole in the front of her mind.

Lexa makes an executive decision to not reply to Clarke’s text. Clarke hasn’t said anything about the picture – no apology, no explanation – and Lexa is ninety-nine percent certain that this picture was never meant for her eyes, so ignoring the entire thing and pretending that it never happened seems like the only logical way forward. Besides, if Lexa acknowledges it, then they’ll need to have a conversation about it, and doing that when all Lexa can think about it how good Clarke’s body looked in the photo is not something that Lexa’s little gay brain feels equipped to handle.

Lexa feels like she is violating Clarke in some way just by thinking about the entire situation. The photo may be gone from her phone, but Lexa can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes, she can think of nothing but the creamy skin of Clarke’s perfect stomach, and the tiny pink frills decorating the front of her panties, and the sly smirk on Clarke’s lips as if she knew just how devastating the photograph would be when she took it.

But as well as the pounding of her heart against her ribcage, there’s also an unsettling emptiness in the pit of Lexa’s stomach. Because Clarke is beautiful and smart and funny and kind and, as Lexa has so recently found out, has an amazing body too (and Lexa has possibly maybe a little bit definitely been nursing a crush on her friend for the last year) but it doesn’t stop the disheartening realisation that if Clarke took that photo, she clearly has a person in her life to send photos like that to.

Somebody that isn’t Lexa.

* * *

“Come in!” says Clarke, unlocking her front door and leading the way inside her house. “Can I get you a drink or something?”

“No thanks, I … let’s just get on with the work.”

To say that Lexa is a mess is an understatement. Lexa has no idea how she’s going to make it through the rest of this project. The walk home to Clarke’s from school was painful enough but at least they had Raven, who lives a few doors down from the Griffin house, as a buffer. Now they have made it to Clarke’s, there is nobody else to hide behind, and Lexa needs to remember how to behave normally around Clarke when it’s just the two of them.

The problem is that she can no longer remember what normal feels like.

It’s way too late to acknowledge the photo now. That would just make things extremely weird – well, weirder than things already are.

Lexa can’t even look Clarke in the eye.

“Okay, that sounds good,” says Clarke. “You know where my room is.”

Lexa closes her eyes and counts to three in her head, before she opens them again and says, “Yep.”

She slowly climbs the stairs to the upper floor of Clarke’s house, enjoying the few moments she has alone to clear her head while Clarke moves around in the kitchen downstairs. But then Lexa pushes open the door to Clarke’s bedroom, and any progress she might have made towards normality disintegrates in an instant.

Lexa has been in Clarke’s bedroom before. But when she steps inside now, she doesn’t see memories of the slumber party they had in eighth grade, or the time they watched the first twenty minutes of a horror movie on Clarke’s laptop before getting too scared and switching to a rom-com, or even the last time they were paired together for a school project and spent hours stretched across Clarke’s bed making a huge poster about the human digestive system. All Lexa sees is the backdrop to the photo she received by accident, the pale blue curtain and the cluttered surface of the dresser that had been the background to a hell of a lot of skin and a sinful scrap of lace.

“What are you-? You can go in, you know.”

Lexa didn’t even hear Clarke coming up the stairs behind her and hearing Clarke’s voice startles her. She shakes herself out of her dumbfounded trance, realising how weird it must be for Clarke to find Lexa standing statue-like in the doorway to her bedroom.

“Yeah,” stammers Lexa. “Just didn’t want to intrude, you know?”

Lexa feels like she’s already intruded way past the boundaries of normal friendship.

“Are you okay?” asks Clarke, dumping her bag on the floor and putting a packet of cookies from the kitchen on her desk, before kicking off her shoes and looking up at Lexa with concern on her face. “You seem a bit off.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just…” Lexa fumbles around for an excuse, before she finally says, “Just tired.” 

“We can postpone to tomorrow night if you’re not feeling up to it,” suggests Clarke. “The presentation isn’t until Friday.”

“No,” Lexa shakes her head. “Let’s just get on with it.”

They spread themselves across Clarke’s bed - definitely  _ not _ helping Lexa’s current state of mind - and Lexa distracts herself by rummaging around in her school bag for her battered copy of  _ Twelfth Night _ and the notes she’s made during class, while Clarke boots up her laptop and opens up the nearly-complete presentation.

“Okay,” she says to Lexa, “so I’ve added in those extra slides that you sent me earlier. We can sort the formatting out later so that the presentation is uniform. But do you maybe want to do a practice run of it now?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” nods Lexa.

“Let’s just do one final check that we have all the information we need,” says Clarke, scrolling through the slides in their presentation. “Do you want to check the brief?”

“Uh…” Lexa panics, knowing full well that she doesn’t have a copy of the brief to check. “No! I’m sure it’s all fine.”

Clarke lifts her head suddenly, looking at Lexa with confusion written on her face.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “You usually like to triple-check everything. Come on, it’ll take us five minutes. Where’s that picture I sent you yesterday?”

Panic rises like bile in Lexa’s throat, obstructing her tongue as she finds herself unable to make any noise other than a garbled string of incoherent noises.

“I  _ did _ send it to you, Lexa,” says Clarke, reaching for her phone. “I know I did, so you can’t play dumb.”

“ _ No _ !”

Lexa considers lunging for Clarke’s phone and knocking it from her hands before she can look for the “proof” that she did send Lexa the instructions for their presentation, proof that Lexa knows isn’t there.

But it’s too late. Lexa watches as all the color drains from Clarke’s face, and her own insides feel like they plummet over the edge of a hundred foot drop. Because Clarke has just realised what she sent to Lexa, and she knows that Lexa has seen it, and she knows that Lexa has hidden the fact that she’s seen it.

Clarke must think that Lexa is the biggest pervert in the world.

“Shit…”

“I swear I deleted it straight away,” Lexa tells Clarke, as her cheeks heat up and turn a deep red colour. “I saw it for like, half a second, and then it was gone.”

She doesn’t tell Clarke that half a second was enough to permanently burn the image onto her eyelids, that even now, all she can think about when she looks at Clarke is what Clarke looks like in fancy lace underwear.

Surprisingly, Clarke doesn’t seem to think that Lexa is at fault.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she groans, covering her own eyes with her hands as she hangs her head in shame. “I’m so sorry that you saw that. I’m mortified.”

“ _ You’re _ mortified?” asks Lexa incredulously. “I feel like I violated your privacy just by looking at that picture.”

“No, Lexa, I…” Clarke reaches out for Lexa’s hand and takes it in her own, an action that startles Lexa as much as seeing the photo did when Clarke sent it by mistake. “You’ve done nothing. If anything, I violated  _ you _ .”

“I-” Lexa chokes on her own words as she tries to come up with something to say, then she blurts out, “I don’t feel violated!”

“Good.”

They fall into silence, though the awkwardness between them is palpable, and Lexa reaches for her copy of  _ Twelfth Night _ and flicks aimlessly through the pages just to give herself something to do. She wonders whether she should volunteer to leave - their presentation is pretty much finished, after all, and all they need to do is run through it a couple of times as practice. Would it really be so bad if Lexa were to leave Clarke’s house now, forcing them to wing it on the day?

Clarke is the one who breaks the silence, not looking up from the screen of her laptop as she says quite tentatively, “So, what did you think of it?”

Lexa's eyes widen in surprise, hoping that Clarke isn't asking what Lexa thinks she is asking.

“The play?” Lexa asks dumbly, letting her copy of the book drop to the bed.

“Not the play, idiot,” Clarke rolls her eyes. “The … the  _ picture _ . The photo I sent you. What did you think of it?”

Lexa lets out a small choking sound and she wonders if it’s possible to die of embarrassment. Clarke wears an expression of curiosity on her face, like she’s genuinely interested in what Lexa thought of her scantily-clad selfie, and it’s impossible for Lexa to put together a coherent opinion when the only words she can think of are  _ hot _ and  _ more  _ and  _ fuck _ .

“It was … I don’t know, Clarke. It was  _ nice _ , I guess.” Lexa glances up at Clarke, then hastily adds, “I mean, from what I remember of it.”

“‘Nice?’ Wow, high praise!”

Lexa’s cheeks turn impossibly redder with the embarrassment of this entire conversation, and she wishes she could turn back time to that day in English class where they were assigned partners for the Shakespeare project and beg the teacher to put her with somebody other than Clarke.

“I told you, I deleted it straight away,” Lexa attempts to justify her answer. “I didn’t know I’d be asked to give a critical review when I received it.”

Clarke eyes Lexa with a trace of a smile on her face for a few seconds, before she looks back down at her laptop with a shrug.

“Fair enough.”

Lexa wants to say something more, something about how even just a half second glimpse at the photo had been enough for Lexa to know that Clarke is easily the most gorgeous girl in the world, something about how Lexa would happily sacrifice all the hard work they’ve put into this presentation and take an  _ F _ grade in exchange for being the one that Clarke sends photos like that to. But she says nothing, because she  _ isn’t _ the one who Clarke sends photos like that to, not intentionally anyway.

“They must be very lucky,” mumbles Lexa.

“Who?” asks Clarke, lifting her head to look at Lexa with a confused frown.

“The person you took that picture for.”

Lexa tries not to let the disappointment show in her voice, tries to be supportive about the fact that Clarke is in a happy and clearly very sexually active relationship.

“The person I…”

Clarke trails off mid-sentence and tips her head back as a bubble of laughter erupts from her throat.

“Lexa, I didn’t take that picture for anybody,” says Clarke, once she’s overcome her fit of laughter. “Unless you count myself.” When Lexa frowns at her in stunned confusion, Clarke explains, “Look, Octavia told me that she sent a picture like that to Lincoln and that he was really into it so I decided to see if I could take one of myself - purely a scientific experiment - in case I ever have somebody that I want to send pictures of myself to in the future. Nobody was supposed to see that picture.”

It takes Lexa a few seconds to process what Clarke is saying, and the question that she asks next is clearly not what Clarke is expecting to hear.

“So there’s nobody … you aren’t dating anybody right now?” Lexa asks for clarification.

“No, but why … hey, why are you smiling?”

Lexa hadn’t realised that she was smiling - sighing with relief,  _ yes _ , but not smiling - and she wipes any trace of emotion off her face and replaces it with one of the utmost seriousness.

“Are you  _ happy _ that I didn’t send that to anybody else?” asks Clarke, narrowing her eyes, though the tone of her voice isn’t angry, just curious. “You’re totally basking in my tragic loneliness, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not!” protests Lexa. “I’m just glad that there isn’t some big burly jackhammer of a boyfriend who will beat me up for laying eyes on something intended for him.”

“Okay, first of all, you could  _ totally _ take down this hypothetical ‘jackhammer’ of a boyfriend,” Clarke says, raising an eyebrow at Lexa, and Lexa has to suppress a smile because she would certainly be able to give it a decent go. “But also, you were  _ jealous _ , weren’t you? You don’t like the idea of me sending nudes to other people because you want…”

“Clarke…” whines Lexa, cutting Clarke off before she can complete her sentence.

“What? It’s true, isn’t it? You…”

“Don’t say it.”

Having an unreciprocated crush on one of her closest friends is bad enough without that friend forcing them both to acknowledge that crush in an one-on-one situation. Lexa would rather die than admit it aloud.

“Don’t say what? That you wish I was sending you nudes on purp-?”

“Fine!” admits Lexa, because the alternative is listening to Clarke state facts that Lexa wishes weren’t true. “I was maybe a little bit jealous.”

Lexa waits for Clarke’s reaction, waits for Clarke to kick off and tell Lexa that she’s gross and a terrible friend and to ask her to leave. But it never comes. Clarke just tilts her head to the side slightly, like she’s scrutinising Lexa in some way, her blue eyes full of curiosity.

“So the nude was more than just ‘nice’?” Clarke eventually asks, a hint of amusement in her voice as if she knows exactly how agonising each second of this unbearable conversation is for Lexa and is basking in that discomfort.

“What?” Lexa says defensively. “No! I - it was…”

Clarke is looking at Lexa like she doesn’t believe a word that Lexa says, and rightfully so, because it’s an outright lie. Lexa doesn’t think that there are enough words in the dictionary to describe how much more than ‘nice’ Clarke’s photo was.

“Yeah, it was hot,” Lexa finally concedes, giving in to the shame of admitting she enjoyed the selfie that Clarke sent her by mistake. “But Clarke, I…” Lexa struggles to find the right words to explain to Clarke that she is so much more to Lexa than an attractive girl who looks good in lacy underwear, because there are hundreds of girls who must fit that description, though there is only one of Clarke. “You’ve always been pretty, and I like spending time with you. And I also really value your friendship so we can pretend that I never said you looked hot in that picture if that’s what you want…”

“Lexa, what are you trying to tell me?”

Lexa doesn’t remember either of them moving, but she suddenly becomes aware that she and Clarke are much closer to each other on Clarke’s bed than they were before. Close enough that if Lexa wanted to kiss Clarke (oh  _ boy _ , does Lexa want to kiss Clarke) she wouldn’t have to lean very far to join their lips.

“I don’t know,” Lexa chickens out of giving Clarke a proper answer, too scared of rejection to tell the truth, though there is a part of her brain that reminds her that she’s already come too far, and that if Clarke wanted to reject her then she already would have done.

“You are terrible at this,” Clarke laughs softly.

“Hey, I’m not the one who accidentally sent a nude to a friend,” says Lexa, an attempt at humour to delay getting to the actual point even longer.

“Okay, so we’re both terrible at this,” admits Clarke. She looks up at Lexa from beneath her lashes with a look that has a devastating effect on Lexa’s sanity, then adds, “Maybe we’re made for each other.”

The implication of Clarke’s words leaves Lexa’s throat dry and her heart really not knowing what to do as it flips and jolts erratically in her chest. To make matters worse (or better, as the case may be), Clarke covers one of Lexa’s hands with her own, the gesture causing her to lean even closer and diminish the gap between them to just a few inches.

Lexa gives in. Clarke seems to be giving her all the signals and if she’s misread them, well  _ fuck _ , she can deal with that problem later because now her lips are on Clarke’s and she has to remember how to kiss when the other person is somebody that Lexa has dreamed of kissing for way longer than she would care to admit. Clarke seems startled at first, perhaps as surprised as Lexa is that Lexa has finally made the move, but then she kisses back, lifting the hand not covering Lexa’s to cup Lexa’s face and keep her close.

It’s a slow kiss, but what it lacks in fervour, it makes up in passion. Lexa has an extensive kiss history of  _ one _ other girl, but she doesn’t remember Costia ever kissing her like this. This kiss is magical, with just the right amount of pressure and not too much tongue and a sweetness that is surprising at first but soon becomes unmistakeable Clarke. It’s kind of kiss that inspires fairytales.

They pull apart, just far enough to rest their foreheads against one another, and Lexa tries to use the brief respite to let both her lungs and her thoughts catch up.

“So,” says Clarke, “about the rest of this presentatio-”

She doesn’t get the rest out. Lexa doesn’t let her.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat to me over on tumblr [@almostafantasia](http://almostafantasia.tumblr.com)


End file.
